Crypto News – One of the network’s founders, Vitalik Buterin, believes that Ethereum has to rekindle the cypherpunk movement that was once imagined for the blockchain in its early stages.
Ethereum Must Go Cypherpunk Again, Says Vitalik Buterin – 2023
Ethereum was first intended to be a public, decentralized shared hard drive that could make use of peer-to-peer messaging and decentralized file storage, according to a blog post published by Buterin on December 28. However, with Ethereum’s shift toward financialization in 2017, the vision started to wane.
Why Does Buterin Think There’s a Need to Go Back to Cypherpunk?
Someone who utilizes encryption to protect their privacy when using a computer network—especially from government authorities—is known as a cypherpunk. Buterin wants to see a strong return of cypherpunk values to Ethereum, including decentralization, open participation, resistance to censorship, and credible neutrality.
In addition, he is still optimistic about the potential of blockchain technology for non-financial apps. In support of some of these cypherpunk ideals, he emphasized the growing popularity of rollups, zero-knowledge proofs, account abstraction, and second-generation privacy solutions.
Resisting these pressures is hard, but if we do not do so, then we risk losing the unique value of the crypto ecosystem, and recreating a clone of the existing web2 ecosystem with extra inefficiencies and extra steps.
Buterin
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